way in utter silence
through the bluest of blue seas, with scarcely a ripple on the sunlit
waters, between amethyst islands studded with emerald fields, making
straight for that which was at one time the bravest, noblest, most
courageous, most beautiful country on earth.

"The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all except their sun is set."

Byron's statue stands in the square, surrounded by evergreens; his
picture is in the Ecole Polytechnique, and his memory and his songs
are revered throughout all Greece. How her beauty tore at his soul!
How her love for freedom met with an echo in his own heart! No wonder
he sang, with such a theme! It was enough to give a stone song and the
very rocks utterance.

It was Sunday, and as we drove through the clean, white streets,
feeling absolutely hushed with the beauty which assailed us on every
side, suddenly we heard the sound of music, mournful as a dirge--a
martial dirge. And presently we saw approaching us the saddest, most
touching yet awful procession I ever beheld. It was a military
funeral. First came the band; then came two men bearing aloft the
cover to the casket, wreathed in flowers and streaming with crape.
Then, borne in an open coffin by four young officers of his staff,
with bands of crape on their arms and knots of crape on their swords,
was the dead officer, an old, gray-haired general, dressed in the full
uniform of the Greek army, with his browned, wrinkled, deep-lined
hands crossed over his sword. The casket was shallow, and thus he was
exposed to the view of the gaping multitude, without even a glass lid
to cover his bronzed face, and with the glaring sun beating down upon
his closed eyes and noble gray head. Just behind him they led his
riderless black horse, with his master's boots reversed in the
stirrups and the empty saddle knotted with crape. It was at once
majestic, heartrending, and terrible. It unnerved me, and yet it was
not surprising to have such a moving spectacle greet me on my return
to Greece.

We drove over the same road from the Piraeus to Athens, but in the two
months of our absence they had mended a worn place in this road and
had unearthed a most beautiful sarcophagus, which they placed in the
national museum. The cement which held it on its pedestal was not yet
dry whe